Protecting Our Kids From The Coming Storms

David Roberts connects the empathy surrounding Newtown to the threat of climate change:

We know that the decisions we are making today are on track to create irreversible and inexorable changes in the global climate that our children and their children will inherit. We know that those changes threaten to slow or reverse our hard-fought gains in peace and health, leaving our descendants a world in violent, unceasing transition, with rising seas, greater droughts, more intense storms, shifting zones of fertility and disease, and waves of climate refugees. We discovered this not through shock or confrontation but through the slow accumulation and careful interpretation of evidence. It is still, to most people, almost entirely an intellectual phenomenon, something they know but do not feel. Relative to the gut-wrenching images out of Newtown, the evidence of the climate threat to children is, by and large, abstract and ethereal. Even those who "know" the extent of climate change find it difficult to feel authentic moral outrage about it.

Yet for every ton of carbon we emit, we are firing a bullet into the air. We may not live to see it, but those bullets will rain down on the children of the future, and they will suffer for it.